Bill's Lecture - Dudley |
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Introduction
Bill's Lecture
Additional Material |
Well, we're coming up to the Top Church at Dudley, we're travelling along - nearly halfway through - which contains this. They call it a stained glass window, it uses the colour of light with a little illumination outside. I don't think very much of it. It’s very heavily painted, a very dark sepia paint. The two angels of the Resurrection and unfortunately in 1940 a bomb fell in the churchyard and this window, the glass upon which the sepia was painted in the enamel painting was like tissue paper, it was so thin. And check a lot of pieces, they're cracked. One or two of them were smashed. And, they did a restoration after the war, at least that's what they called it, restoration.
Now we come to this
other, shall I call it a monstrosity? Dare I?
It had only been in for
two and a half years and it all started to fall apart. It isn't true
stained glass at all, it’s just pieces of glass stuck on to plain glass, I
think it’s armour plate glass. Now when you stick coloured glass onto a
piece of plate glass, or armour plate glass, you've got two dissimilar
kinds of glass you people will know what it is, tracing glass. You've got
to get similar types, haven't you. Especially in the open air, outside.
We're asking for trouble, because the expansion rate in bright sunlight
and frost is going to be more than they’ll take. And in fact the glass
they used, it wasn't that thick glass a lot of it was only thin double
rolled, rolled out by the mile, you know. But I could never, then 2 years
after it fell down, it cost them £8000 to renovate it up, it was only a
short while It was a white elephant if ever there was one.
(This was installed
in the Churchill Centre in Dudley. In 2016 as far as I can ascertain it
has been removed and put into storage). |
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